Bob Dallmeyer has recommended this article which appeared in Meetings and Conventions on November 1, 2010. It has been written by Michael J. Shapiro. I have divided it into two parts, with the remaining article to be a posted on Friday.
How Social Media Has Transformed Trade Shows
Keeping in touch with your audience before, during and after the event
Social media activity at one of the world’s largest trade shows skyrocketed this year: Ten times more people contributed information and commentary through the handful of active platforms than did at the previous event. Was it a show known for its youthful crowd or cutting-edge consumer gadgetry? Not at all: It was September’s International Manufacturing Technology Show.
“Traditionally, manufacturing has been an older crowd that was slow to adopt social media,” admits Monica Haley, marketing communications manager for the Chicago-based Association for Manufacturing Technology, which owns the trade show. But this year, according to Haley and co-worker Lee Anne Orange, special projects manager for exhibitions, something changed. Watching the discussion unfold on Twitter, in particular, caused many to reassess their perception of these forums. Social media went from “things their kids did” to effective business and marketing communications tools.
Haley has worked with AMT’s social media initiative since its inception in 2006 and helped to debut several platforms at the 2008 IMTS (the show is biennial.) She didn’t think the association should be limited by the increasingly outdated notion that social media only caters to a younger demographic. “That inevitably would change, as we knew it would. And we wanted to get out ahead of the curve,” she explains, adding that this year’s success in large part was driven by the proliferation of mobile technology.
“More people are walking around with smartphones and iPads and using them at the show,” Haley points out. Plus, there’s the popularity of the platforms themselves: Facebook grew from 100 million users in 2008 to more than 500 million in just two years — while increasingly gaining users a good deal older than the college crowd for which it was originally created. Twitter’s community exploded from about three million just two years ago to more than 160 million in 2010. LinkedIn grew nearly 350 percent in the same period and now has more than 80 million users.
Clearly, the masses have embraced social media; for trade show organizers, it’s just a matter of learning how best to use it.
Not just for prime time. Don’t rush into this new technology without a strategy, cautions independent trade show presenter Emilie Barta, who also worked with the IMTS event this year. Barta, who is based in St. Louis (“but I live out of a suitcase”), helps associations and exhibitors fine-tune their messaging; in her experience, audiences will be quick to dismiss your efforts if you don’t take the task seriously.
A crucial point, says Barta, and one that might be counterintuitive for many trade show organizers, is that the best strategy is one that isn’t built around the event itself. Rather, it should be based on creating a year-round community. “Social media is used to develop relationships and have conversations, not just broadcast sales messages,” she notes. “A trade show provides a disservice to its audience members if it does not employ a 365-day social media strategy. The shows that do that and have very conversational approaches are the ones that succeed. The actual trade show just becomes one of the things to talk about in a given moment.”
Jordan Schwartz, whose Seattle-based company, Pathable, provides custom social media platforms for events, fully agrees with Barta and adds, “If you regard any kind of trade show or conference as a two- or three-day event, you are squandering an opportunity. The best value that an exhibitor can get from a trade show is a long-term relationship with a customer. You can try to start a long-term relationship with a five-minute visit in a booth, but its really going to be most valuable when trust and understanding and background knowledge are built over time.”
Working the platforms. The social media team that worked on this year’s IMTS show devised a strategy that relied on five social media platforms. Although the show itself occurs only once every two years, the team maintains their presence on four of the platforms year-round, and simply shifts focus before and during the event, with the posts then becoming more timely and information-based. That’s a natural use of the platforms, Barta explains, and is part of what differentiates one from another. “You have to give the messaging to your audience in the way they want to receive it,” she says, noting that some people prefer Twitter, while others prefer LinkedIn. “It’s a different way to build communities, and those communities may take on different personalities.”
For IMTS, the team focused on the communities they have cultivated through the following media.
Twitter. AMT attempts to share information year-round on Twitter, according to Monica Haley, but as the actual event approaches — and then, especially, during the event — it becomes a primary means of communication. “During the six-day show,” she says, “posts are going to be coming in as fast as they ever will.” Think of Twitter like text messaging: Its immediacy works particularly well when trying to reach mobile attendees on the show floor.
“We did a lot of interaction with the exhibitors,” explains Barta, who tweeted from her own account during the show. “If they were hosting something in their booths at a particular time, we promoted that. If we stopped by a booth and saw something cool, we took a picture and promoted it.”
Facebook. This was another area of focus during the event itself. Facebook, though, has the potential to address both immediate concerns and more in-depth conversations, because people use it in different ways. On one hand, especially for those with a lot of Facebook friends, the status updates in the live feed can become buried relatively quickly. But it’s also easy to navigate directly to an event’s page, to take a quick look at what’s been posted and see any conversations that have sprung up in response.
“With Facebook, it’s all about having a conversation,” notes Barta. “It’s about using the platform to get conversations going among the audience. It’s a great way to get information from the audience — to get people to comment and have people comment on each others comments. You also can have your audience members post pictures. It kind of becomes a bulletin board.”
LinkedIn. This is an important platform for the association in general, but during the event AMT kept the activity here fairly low. “We decided we’d have a little bit of conversation on LinkedIn,” explains Haley, “because we always have LinkedIn groups associated with manufacturing and the membership. But it doesn’t necessarily lend itself very well to a live discussion. It works very well as a kind of static post that unfolds into a discussion over a longer period of time.”
As with every platform, though, it all depends on the nature of the group. “Most people look at LinkedIn as their professional Rolodex,” points out Barta, and there could very well be opportunities through that platform for people to connect at the show. (Note that many event-specific social media agents, such as Pathable and CrowdVine, offer some integration with LinkedIn contacts.) Plus, adds Barta, because LinkedIn has more of a corporate following, “you might get an audience there that would never touch Facebook.”
YouTube. The IMTS team made good use of YouTube as a marketing channel before the show, and also used it as an outlet to post reports during the event. In the months leading up to opening day, they uploaded a lot of content to convey basic information about the show and about Chicago. Attendees could watch informational videos (featuring the association’s vice president of communications) about navigating the O’Hare and Midway airports, for example, and getting into the city. The team also tapped the exhibitors for contributions.
“We solicited them to contribute on YouTube as well, by doing a program where they could make their own 60-second videos to try to convince people to visit their booths,” Haley says. “They put them up, and people got to vote on them. The one that won got to be featured on the home page, and we gave it some other recognition as well.”
During the show, the social media team recorded people answering a question of the day, which was edited and posted on YouTube daily. They also shot and posted additional footage of various aspects of the show to reveal what might be otherwise missed by many attendees at such a large event.
SCVNGR. This was the one platform where use was restricted to the event itself, by necessity. SCVNGR is a geo-location game that can be played through an app on mobile devices, or via text messaging for those without smartphones. “Basically, we didn’t want to leave out one important social media component,” says Haley of ATM’s decision to experiment with geo-location technology.
SCVNGR provides a way to direct attendees to predetermined locations to complete “treks.” The competitive aspect, as well as the opportunity to earn prizes by completing these treks, can increase attendee engagement. There also are potential sponsorship opportunities. In the case of this year’s show, the Chicago Convention and Tourism Bureau provided the platform. (For a closer look at SCVNGR’s use, see “Experimenting With Geo-Location”).
Friday the remaining portion will be posted.
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